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Maggie Oliver, a former Greater Manchester police officer who exposed the alleged cover-up of sex-grooming crimes in the region, accused the inquiry of being “too frightened to open the hornet’s nest”.
Sammy Woodhouse, a Rotherham victim, claimed that those running the statutory inquiry, which began in 2015 and has cost £143 million so far, “have not placed survivors at the forefront” and are “selective in what they decide to look at”. She added: “If you are going to get to the root of gang-related child sexual exploitation you need to go right to the heart of it. They are trying to bury what happened in places like Rotherham and Rochdale because they’re scared of being called racist.” […]
Since 2011, groups have been prosecuted for sex-grooming in towns including Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford, Telford, Burnley, High Wycombe, Leicester, Dewsbury, Peterborough, Halifax and Newcastle upon Tyne.
The IICSA held two weeks of public hearings for its “organised networks” investigation from late September, and a final day for closing submissions is due to take place on Thursday. It decided to hear no evidence from survivors or those with expert knowledge of the crime pattern.
The inquiry chose instead to select six areas of England and Wales: St Helens, Tower Hamlets in east London, Swansea, Durham, Bristol and Warwickshire “because they represent a range of sizes, demographics and institutional practices”. None of the six has witnessed a major prosecution of a south Asian sex-grooming gang. In all six areas, according to the 2011 national census, the proportion of the population that is of Pakistani origin is lower than the national average.
Henrietta Hill, QC, lead counsel to the inquiry, told the hearing on its opening day that the inquiry “carefully considered the extent to which, if at all, it should focus on areas such as Rochdale, Rotherham and Oxford, all of which have attracted public attention”.
The IICSA decided, she explained, that it was “more appropriate” to focus instead on “different areas, not least because it was intended that this was a forward-looking investigation building on analysis that’s already been done”.
The two weeks of oral evidence was dominated by the questioning of institutional representatives from the six areas about their safeguarding practices in relation to child exploitation by organised networks.
In areas, note, carefully chosen because they have no record of child exploitation by organised networks. So that was easy.
And since when were enquiries into past crimes meant to be forward-looking? The IICSA's remit was to investigate how the country's institutions handled their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse: not how they will handle it.
Once again the young victims of organised grooming gangs are being betrayed by the authorities.
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